Raid of Small Kansas Newspaper Raises Free Press Concerns

A small town in Kansas has become a battleground over the First Amendment, after the local police force and county sheriff’s deputies raided the office of The Marion County Record.

Raids of news organizations are exceedingly rare in the United States, with its long history of legal protections for journalists. At The Record, a family-owned paper with a circulation of about 4,000, the police seized computers, servers and cellphones of reporters and editors. They also searched the home of the publication’s owner and semiretired editor as well as the home of a city councilwoman.

The searches, conducted on Friday, appeared to be linked to an investigation into how a document containing information about a local restaurateur found its way to the local newspaper — and whether the restaurant owner’s privacy was violated in the process. The editor of the newspaper said the raids may have had more to do with tensions between the paper and officials in Marion, a town of about 2,000 north of Wichita, over prior coverage.

The raid is one of several recent cases of local authorities taking aggressive actions against news organizations — some of which are part of a dwindling cohort left in their area to hold governments to account. And it fits a pattern of pressure being applied to local newsrooms. One recent example is the 2019 police raid of the home of Bryan Carmody, a freelance journalist in San Francisco, who was reporting on the death of Jeff Adachi, a longtime public defender.

“There’s a lot of healthy tension between the government and newspapers, but this?” Emily Bradbury, the executive director of the Kansas Press Association, said in an interview about the raid in Marion. She warned that the raid was a dangerous attack on press freedom in the country.

“This is not right, this is wrong, this cannot be allowed to stand,” she said.

The newspaper’s owner and editor, Eric Meyer, said in an interview that the newspaper had done nothing wrong. The newspaper did not publish an article about the government record, though Mr. Meyers said that it had received a copy from a confidential source and that one of its reporters had verified its authenticity using the state’s records available online.

In an email, Marion’s chief of police, Gideon Cody, defended the raid, which was earlier reported online by The Marion County Record and by Kansas Reflector, a nonprofit news organization.

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On Sunday, more than 30 news organizations and press freedom advocates, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, signed a letter from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to Mr. Cody condemning the raid.

The Marion County Record is uncommonly aggressive for its size. Mr. Meyer said that the newspaper, which has seven employees, has stoked the ire of some local leaders for its vigorous reporting on Marion County officials, including asking questions about Mr. Cody’s employment history.